Sancta Rosalia, Virgo Panormitana — a Life, for her feast on the fourth day of September
Proper calendar of Palermo and of Sicily. In the General Calendar of 1962 this day is a feria of the fourteenth week after Pentecost, and the Mass of the preceding Sunday is said; St. Rosalia is commemorated on this day in the Roman Martyrology, and her Mass is proper to the churches of Sicily.
Ego Rosalia Sinibaldi, Quisquinae et Rosarum domini filia, amore Domini mei Iesu Christi in hoc antro habitari decrevi. “I, Rosalia, daughter of Sinibald, lord of Quisquina and of the Roses, have resolved, for love of my Lord Jesus Christ, to dwell in this cave.” — inscription found in the grotto of the Quisquina, 1624
I. Identity and origins
Of very few saints in the calendar is so little known with certainty, and about so few has so much been said with confidence. The reader deserves to have the two things separated at the outset.
What is attested beyond dispute is this: that the Church of Palermo has kept the memory of a virgin named Rosalia on the fourth of September since the Middle Ages; that churches were dedicated to her in Sicily as early as the thirteenth century; that in the summer of 1624 bones were found in a cave on Monte Pellegrino above Palermo and, after examination, were pronounced to be hers; that the plague which was then killing the city ceased after those bones were carried in procession; and that Urban VIII, in 1630, inscribed her name in the Roman Martyrology. That is the documentary skeleton. Everything else clothes it.
The tradition — set down in its received form by the Sicilian Jesuit Ottavio Gaetani in the early seventeenth century, and examined critically by the Bollandist Joannes Stilting in the Acta Sanctorum for September — makes her the daughter of Sinibald, lord of the Quisquina and of the Monte delle Rose in the country south of Palermo, and of a mother sometimes named Maria Guiscarda, sometimes simply Rosa; it makes the family kin to the Norman house and, more remotely, to the blood of Charlemagne; it places her birth about the year 1130, in Palermo, and her girlhood at the court of King Roger II, perhaps as a lady of the queen’s household. Gaetani himself confessed that, search as he would, he could find almost nothing left by earlier generations concerning her. The descent from Charlemagne is a courtly ornament of the kind that Sicilian genealogy of the period supplied to any noble house that wished it, and is to be received as traditio pia and nothing more. The name Sinibald, and the lordship of the Quisquina, rest on firmer ground, for they are given by the inscription in the cave, and the inscription is discussed below.
Her name is Germanic, not Latin — Roslind or Rosalind, latinized and softened, so that the later devotion could hear in it the rose and the lily together, rosa and lilium, virginity crowned with charity. The Palermitans have never called her anything so formal. She is la Santuzza, the little saint.
II. Life and virtues: the flight to the mountain
The tradition is unanimous that she left the world young, and unanimous as to why: not from disappointment or from fear, but because she had seen the court and preferred the cave. She is said to have been sought in marriage — some accounts name a Count Baldwin, who had saved the king’s life from a boar and asked her hand as his reward — and to have answered the proposal by going away. Whether or not the count is a fact, the pattern is the oldest one in the lives of the virgin saints: the refusal of a good in order to hold fast to a better, unum est necessarium.
She went first, the tradition says, to the mountains of the Quisquina, her father’s country, and lived in a grotto there; then, after some years, she crossed to Monte Pellegrino, the great limestone headland that closes the bay of Palermo on the north, and made her cell in a cave near its summit. There she lived as the Fathers of the desert had lived — in prayer, in fasting, in silence, and in the company of no one — and there, on or about the fourth of September in a year near 1160 or 1166, she died, alone, and was covered by the dripping stone.
The twelfth century in Sicily was, in fact, the great age of the hermit. Under the Norman kings, Greek monasticism, which had survived the Saracen centuries, and Latin monasticism, which the conquerors brought with them, flourished side by side, and the solitary life on the mountains was held in the highest honour. The tradition of Rosalia sits naturally in that world, and this is one of the stronger arguments for its substantial truth: whoever first told the story was not inventing a saint out of season.
Of her virtues the tradition names three, and they are the three that the Common of Virgins presupposes. Virginity, kept not as a privation but as a wedding-garment: the Gospel of her Mass is the parable of the lamps, and she is numbered among the wise. Poverty of the most absolute kind: she who might have had a palace chose a hole in the rock, and the mountain was her cloister. And penance — the crucifix and the skull with which the painters have furnished her cave are not decoration but a summary. The Sicilian devotion has always understood her as a saint of the contemptus mundi, and the devotion is not wrong.
III. The hidden centuries
Then she was forgotten, or nearly. This is the part of the story that a hagiography anxious to edify would pass over, and this one will not.
There is evidence of a real, if modest, medieval cult. The Church of Palermo kept her name on the fourth of September; a church was dedicated to her at Palermo in 1237, and others in the island followed; her image appears in Sicilian art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But by the sixteenth century her memory had thinned almost to nothing. Her Vita, if she ever had one, was lost. When the Jesuit Valerio Rossi wrote of her about 1590, and Gaetani after him, they were gathering fragments — local traditions, pictures, a few calendar entries — and confessing how few the fragments were. Palermo in those years had other patrons: St. Christina, St. Ninfa, St. Oliva, St. Agatha. Rosalia had a name, a day, and a cave, and little else.
IV. Death and cult: the plague of 1624
In May of 1624 a ship from Tunis brought the plague to Palermo. By the following year it had killed some ten thousand of the city’s people, and the ordinary remedies of the time — quarantine, processions, the relics of the older patrons — had not stopped it.
In the midst of the mortality it was reported that a sick woman had seen the virgin Rosalia in a vision, had been healed, and had been told to go to the little church on Monte Pellegrino. Afterwards the saint appeared, the tradition says, to a certain Vincenzo Bonelli, a soap-maker of the city who had gone up the mountain in grief for his wife dead of the plague, and showed him the place in the cave where her bones lay, bidding him tell the Archbishop that they should be carried through the city, and that the plague would cease. On the fifteenth of July 1624 the cave was searched and the bones were found.
What followed is the strongest part of the record, precisely because the Church did not hurry. The bones were embedded in the stone and encrusted with the calcareous deposit of centuries; at first sight it was not even certain that they were human. The Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Giannettino Doria, who was also the King of Spain’s lieutenant in Sicily, refused to permit any cult until the matter was examined. He appointed a commission of physicians, theologians, and canonists, which sat for months, and it was not until the eleventh of February 1625 that it pronounced the relics to be those of a human body and, on the weight of the ancient tradition of the place, of Rosalia. Meanwhile, on the twenty-fifth of August 1624, workmen at the Dominican house of Santo Stefano Quisquina, sixty miles away, had uncovered in a cave the inscription quoted at the head of this Life — a rude Latin text, cut into the rock, in which Rosalia names herself, her father, and her purpose. It was taken, then and by many since, as a confirmation of the whole tradition in her own hand.
On the ninth of June 1625 the relics were carried in solemn procession through Palermo. The plague, which had been waning, ceased; and on the third of September of that year Cardinal Doria, in his civil capacity, declared the city free of contagion by the intercession of St. Rosalia and lifted the restrictions on movement and trade. Palermo proclaimed her its patroness. The cave on Monte Pellegrino was enclosed as a sanctuary, and the great annual Festino of July, which has been kept for four hundred years, dates from that summer.
Anthony van Dyck was in Palermo that year, shut in the city by the quarantine, and painted her repeatedly — a slender girl in a hermit’s brown, crowned with roses by angels, interceding above the bay of Palermo. It is his images, more than any text, that fixed her likeness for the Catholic world, and that carried her name over the sea to the New World, where Sicilian colonies in Venezuela and elsewhere keep her feast to this day.
In 1630 Urban VIII placed her in the Roman Martyrology, on the fifteenth of July for the finding of her relics and on the fourth of September for her death. This is her canonization, of the equipollent kind: the Church, confronted with an ancient cult and a public miracle, did not open a process but confirmed a judgment.
The shadow: what the relics prove
Two things must be said honestly here, because the Santuzza has drawn more than her share of sceptics, and the reader should not meet the objections first from an unfriendly source.
The first concerns the inscription of the Quisquina. Its Latin is rough, its lettering has been variously dated, and it was found, with striking convenience, forty days after the bones and in the very year of the plague. Some scholars hold it to be a genuine twelfth-century graffito and the one document of the saint’s own hand; others hold it to be a pious work of 1624. The question is not settled and this Life does not settle it. What can be said is that the inscription is not the foundation of the cult but a late buttress to it: the name, the day, and the cave were all known before anyone read the wall.
The second concerns the bones. It has been repeated in nearly every account of the English geologist William Buckland that, visiting Palermo in the 1820s, he examined the relics and pronounced them the bones of a goat, and that the reliquary was thereafter kept closed. The anecdote comes from Buckland’s admirers and cannot now be tested; the seventeenth-century commission, whose members were not fools and who had the bones before them for months, judged otherwise. But the deeper point is this: the Church’s judgment in 1625 and 1630 rested on the ancient cult and on a public deliverance, not on osteology. If every bone in the reliquary were of doubtful identity, Rosalia would remain what the Martyrology says she is, a virgin of Palermo who fled to the mountains for the love of Christ, and Palermo would remain a city that was delivered from the plague when it called upon her. Relics are a great good; they are not the thing believed.
V. Spiritual documents
She left none, unless the inscription is hers; and if it is hers, it is the whole of her theology in a sentence. Amore Domini mei Iesu Christi in hoc antro habitari decrevi. The motive is love; the object is the Lord; the act is a decision; the place is a hole in the rock. A whole rule of life is compressed there, and it is the same rule St. Anthony learned from a single Gospel, and St. Benedict from a cave at Subiaco.
For the theology of her state one may go to the Fathers whom she would have known by report. St. Athanasius, in the Life of Antony, shows the desert as the place where the soul, stripped of everything that is not God, discovers that it was made for Him alone. St. Jerome, writing to Eustochium on the keeping of virginity (Ep. 22), sets the choice she made in its full severity and its full reward. And St. Thomas, treating the solitary life (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 188, a. 8), teaches that the eremitical state is not a flight from the common life of the Church but its summit, fit only for those already perfected in the cenobitic virtues — which is why the tradition insists that she went to the mountain not as a novice but as one who had already learned, in the court and in her father’s house, what the world had to offer and what it could not.
VI. The Collect
Her Mass, in the churches of Sicily, is taken from the Common of Virgins — Dilexisti iustitiam, the Mass of a virgin not a martyr — and the Collect of that Common asks for what her life displays:
Exaudi nos, Deus, salutaris noster: ut, sicut de beatae Rosaliae Virginis tuae festivitate gaudemus; ita piae devotionis erudiamur affectu.
“Graciously hear us, O God our Saviour: that, as we rejoice in the festival of blessed Rosalia Thy virgin, so we may be instructed in the affection of a holy devotion.”
Erudiamur — “may we be taught.” It is the same word the Church uses of the schoolmaster Calasanctius a week earlier, and it is exact. A hermitess teaches nothing by speech. She teaches by being what she is, and by having chosen it.
VII. Aspiration
There is in every life a court and a cave — a place where one is seen, and a place where one is alone with God — and most of us have arranged matters so that the court is large and the cave is small. Rosalia reversed the proportion. She is not, for most of the faithful, a saint to be imitated in her state; she is a saint to be imitated in her decision, and the decision can be made in a kitchen.
Examine. What is the thing I would not leave? Not the great renunciations, which are easy to admire, but the small attachments that would have to be given up if God asked for the cave: a reputation, a comfort, an audience.
Do. Give God one hour this week in which no one can see you — not a devotion performed in company, but a solitude kept for His sake. If a whole hour is impossible, a quarter of one; the Santuzza would say that the size of the cave does not matter.
Pray. Sancta Rosalia, quae, amore Christi, regnis patriis relictis, in montibus et speluncis solitariam duxisti vitam: ora pro nobis, ut, quae mundo sunt, contemnere, et quae Dei sunt, diligere discamus. — “St. Rosalia, who, having left thy father’s realms for love of Christ, didst lead a solitary life in the mountains and caves: pray for us, that we may learn to despise the things of the world and to love the things of God.”
Devote. The Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, with attention to the Assumption and the Coronation, for the Virgin’s virgin; or, for those under the shadow of sickness, the ancient Sicilian practice of the acchianata, the barefoot climb to the sanctuary on the eve of her feast, made in spirit if not on the mountain.
VIII. Further study
Acta Sanctorum, September, tome II, under the fourth day: the Bollandist Stilting’s commentary is the critical foundation, and is honest about how little he could find. Ottavio Gaetani’s Vitae Sanctorum Siculorum (1657) preserves the tradition as the seventeenth century received it. The Martyrology’s own entry for the day — “at Palermo, St. Rosalia, virgin of Palermo, of the blood of Charlemagne, who for the love of Christ left her father’s realms and led a solitary life in mountains and caves” — is the Church’s compressed Vita, and repays being read for what it asserts and what it leaves alone.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the hermits and the virgins of the West — Antony, Paul the First Hermit, Benedict at Subiaco, Rose of Lima, and Rosalia’s Sicilian elder sisters Agatha and Lucy — and with the question of what the Church believes when she believes in a saint whose history is thin and whose cult is thick. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Common of Virgins and the parable of the ten lamps that governs it. The Church History path takes up the plague-saints of the seventeenth century and the Church’s discipline in the examination of relics.
Sancta Rosalia, Virgo Panormitana, ora pro nobis.